miscellany

I felt rather shaken last year when asked to deliver an annual Oration to the London School of Economics and Political Science; I concluded that the Committee must have heard of my economic and political naïveté, and of my dedication to a poetic way of thought, and wanted perhaps to hear me enlarge on the text ‘If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.’

I admit having once used this comeback on a businessman who was kindly urging me to write a best-seller rather than poems which no ordinary mortal (meaning himself) could understand. Yet poets need never have empty purses. . . . This may sound somewhat starry-eyed, like the Biblical injunction to trust in the Lord, for He will provide. . . . But since economists study the science of money, maybe they should be reminded once in a while of certain poetic and religious imponderables without which economics make no sense—or no more than do the logistical war-games, played by budding generals at Staff Colleges, which disregard such unlogistical factors in real warfare as morale, weather, accident and miracle.

Let me start with the etymology of ‘money’. . . .